Having fun at the Museum of Science

     One of my favorite places to go in Boston is the Museum of Science; I had the opportunity to go for the first time on my freshmen year and since then I had the opportunity to visit the museum several times. Last week, I had another opportunity to  go to the museum one more time. Normally on my visits, I will go straight to the electricity section; but this time I visited new exhibitions. All these exhibitions were related to the topics that we have covered in our class throughout this  semester,such as, green energy and advances in technology that will help the environment. These were the exhibitions that we visited: “Conserve at home”,“Catching the wind”, “Energized”, and “Microrobotics takes flight”

     Our first stop was “Conserve at home”;  this exhibition showed how  by  making simple changes such as the type of light bulbs that we  use  will help us save energy.   This  exhibition had two particular demonstrations that called my attention; the first one  consisted of: a water tank that represents a specific amount of watts and two buttons  that  represents us “turning on” two household devices: a hair dryer and a mixer. By pression one of the buttons the tank starts to drain at particular speed which is equivalent to the  amount of watts consumed by this device. The mixer will drain the tank at a greater speed than the hair dryer; taught us how to be aware of the devices that we use in our household and how using all of the at the same time will have a great impact in out kilowatt/hour consumption.

    The second demonstration consisted on 3 different type of light bulbs and the only way to turn them on was by  using a hand crank generator. The 3 bulbs were an LED (requires at least 8watts  to turn on); an Incandescent bulb (requires 40 watts to turn on); and a CFL bulb(requires  9 watts to light up). As  you might have guessed the incandescent  light bulb  requires a lot more effort and work from the generator to  light up; whereas lighting up the LED was much easier and required much less work. This exhibition demonstrates that a simple change in your houses such as the type of light bulbs that we use  will create a different in the power consumption.

Picture 1 : Starting our tour with “Conserve at home” light bulb exhibition

    After learning how to conserve energy at home we moved  to the “Energized” exhibition  where we learned about different power generation methods that will  help us in the future such as solar panels and wind turbines.  The museum of science counts with solar panel in the rooftop. These solar panels provide the energy required for some exhibitions and presentations such as  the electricity presentation and  the van de graaff machine that is used on this presentation. This exhibition also provided information on the different types of power plants in the state of Massachusetts  and how the amount of these have incremented  have  increased significantly in the past 10 years.

     The significant increase in wind turbines in Massachusetts  lead us to the next exhibition “Catching the wind”. This exhibition showed us the power of the wind and how it can be used to generate energy. The most interesting part of this exhibition was to learn about the different types  of wind turbines: Skystream, Proven 6, AVX1000 , Swift and Windspire. The exhibitions provided a graphical representation of the power productions for each type of wind turbine. The most efficient is the Proven 6 (see picture below) that produces almost 5000 watts with wind speed of 20 miles/hour. On the contrary, the windspire (see picture below) is the least efficient  type of turbine; it only produces  a little more that 500 watts with a wind speed of 25 miles/hour.

Picture 2 : Proven 6 power production graph

Picture 3 : Windspire power production graph

   Finally; our last stop  was the “microrobotics take flight”  exhibition.  Personally I believe this exhibition was one of the most interesting and futuristic from this trip.  This exhibition  talked about some microrobotics devices called Robobees.  “The Robobees research team has been working for years to develop a colony of robotics bees, while also advancing microrobotic technology.  A wide range of  experts from Harvard and Northeastern universities are collaborating to create this tiny, complex, flying robot. The researches are divided into three specialized laboratories developing the Robobee brain, body and colony”

   One of the activities on this exhibition was to combine different types of  sensors and battery values  to  obtain the highest efficiency  for the Robobees. The purpose of  the colony of robobees would be to pollinate   specific  areas. These reason  I find these so interesting  is that  by   a big colony of Robobees then  a larger area can be rapidly pollinated  and therefore  help the environment.

After  learning about Robobees,  our Museum of Science  was over but  I couldn’t  leave    without  visiting and watching the indoor lightning show.